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The "Cartesian Meditations" translation is based primarily on the printed text, edited by Professor S. Strasser and published in the first volume of Husserliana: Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ISBN 90-247-0214-3. Most of Husserl's emendations, as given in the Appendix to that volume, have been treated as if they were part of the text. The others have been translated in footnotes.
Secondary consideration has been given to a typescript (cited as "Typescript C") on which Husserl wrote in 1933: "Cartes. Meditationen / Originaltext 1929 / E. Husserl / für Dorion Cairns". Its use of emphasis and quotation marks conforms more closely to Husserl’s practice, as exemplified in works published during his lifetime. In this respect the translation usually follows Typescript C. Moreover, some of the variant readings n this typescript are preferable and have been used as the basis for the translation. Where that is the case, the published text is given or translated in a foornote.
The published text and Typescript C have been compared with the French translation by Gabrielle Pfeiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris, Armand Collin, 1931). The use of emphasis and quotation marks in the French translation corresponds more closely to that in Typescript C than to that in the published text. Often, where the wording of the published text and that of Typescript C differ, the French translation indicates that it was based on a text that corresponded more closely to one or the other – usually to Typescript C. In such cases the French translation has been quoted or cited in a foornote.

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Table of Contents

§ 1. Descartes’ Meditations as the prototype of philosophical reflection.- § 2. The necessity of a radical new beginning of philosophy.- First Meditation. The Way to the Transcendental Ego.- § 3. The Cartesian overthrow and the guiding final idea of an absolute grounding of science.- § 4. Uncovering the final sense of science by becoming immersed in science qua noematic phenomenon.- § 5. Evidence and the idea of genuine science.- § 6. Differentiations of evidence. The philosophical demand for an evidence that is apodictic and first in itself.- § 7. The evidence for the factual existence of the world not apodictic; its inclusion in the Cartesian overthrow.- § 8. The ego cogito as transcendental subjectivity.- § 9. The range covered by apodictic evidence of the “Iam”.- § 10. Digression: Descartes’ failure to make the transcendental turn.- § 11. The psychological and the transcendental Ego. The transcendency of the world.- Second Meditation. The Field of Transcendental Experience Laid Open in Respect of its Universal Structures.- § 12. The idea of a transcendental grounding of knowledge.- § 13. Necessity of at first excluding problems relating to the range covered by transcendental knowledge.- § 14. The stream of cogitationes. Cogito and cogitatum.- § 15. Natural and transcendental reflection.- § 16. Digression: Necessary beginning of both transcendental “purely psychological” reflection with the ego cogito.- § 17. The two-sidedness of inquiry into consciousness as an investigation of correlatives. Lines of description. Synthesis as the primal form belonging to consciousness.- § 18. Identification as the fundamental form of synthesis. The all-embracing synthesis of transcendental time.- § 19. Actuality and potentiality of intentional life.- § 20. The peculiar nature of intentional analysis.- § 21. The intentional object as “transcendental clue”.- § 22. The idea of the universal unity comprising all objects, and the task of clarifying it constitutionally.- Third Meditation. Constitutional Problems. Truth and Actuality.- § 23. A more pregnant concept of constitution, under the titles “reason” and “unreason”.- § 24. Evidence as itself-givenness and the modifications of evidence.- § 25. Actuality and quasi-actuality.- § 26. Actuality as the correlate of evident varification.- § 27. Habitual and potential evidence as functioning constitutively for the sense “existing object”.- § 28. Presumptive evidence of world-experience. World as an idea correlative to a perfect experiential evidence.- § 29. Material and formal ontological regions as indexes pointing to transcendental systems of evidence.- Fourth Meditation. Development of the Constitutional Problems Pertaining to the Transcendental Ego Himself.- § 30. The transcendental ego inseparable from the processes making up his life.- § 31. The Ego as identical pole of the subjective processes.- § 32. The Ego as substrate of habitualities.- § 33. The full concretion of the Ego as monad and the problem of his self-constitution.- § 34. A fundamental development of phenomenological method. Transcendental analysis as eidetic.- § 35. Excursus into eidetic internal psychology.- § 36. The transcendental ego as the universe of possible forms of subjective process. The compossibility of subjective processes in coexistence or succession as subject to eidetic laws.- § 37. Time as the universal form of all egological genesis.- § 38. Active and passive genesis.- § 39. Association as a principle of passive genesis.- § 40. Transition to the question of transcendental idealism.- § 41. Genuine phenomenological explication of one’s own “ego cogito” as transcendental idealism.- Fifth Meditation. Uncovering of the Sphere of Transcendental Being as Monadological Intersubjectivity.- § 42. Exposition of the problem of experiencing someone else, in rejoinder to the objection that phenomenology entails solipsism.- § 43. The noematic-ontic mode of givenness of the Other, as transcendental clue for the constitutional theory of the experience of someone else.- § 44. Reduction of transcendental experience to the sphere of ownness.- § 45. The transcendental ego, and self-apperception as a psychophysical man reduced to what is included in my ownness.- § 46. Ownness as the sphere of the actualities and potentialities of the stream of subjective processes.- § 47. The intentional object also belongs to the full monadic concretion of ownness. Immanent transcendence and primordial world.- § 48. The transcendency of the Objective world as belonging to a level higher than that of primordial transcendency.- § 49. Predelineation of the course to be followed by intentional explication of experiencing what is other.- § 50. The mediate intentionality of experiencing someone else, as “appresentation” (analogical apperception).- § 51. “Pairing” as an associatively constitutive component of my experience of someone else.- § 52. Appresentation as a kind of experience with its own style of verification.- § 53. Potentialities of the primordial sphere and their constitutive function in the apperception of the Other.- § 54. Explicating the sense of the appresentation wherein I experience someone else.- § 55. Establishment of the community of monads. The first form of Objectivity: intersubjective Nature.- § 56. Constitution of higher levels of intermonadic community.- § 57. Clarification of the parallel between explication of what is internal to the psyche and egological transcendental explication.- § 58. Differentiation of problems in the intentional analysis of higher intersubjective communities. I and my surrounding world.- § 59. Ontological explication and its place within constitutional transcendental phenomenology as a whole.- § 60. Metaphysical results of our explication of experiencing someone else.- § 61. The traditional problems of “psychological origins” and their phenomenological clarification.- § 62. Survey of our intentional explication of experiencing someone else.- Conclusion.- § 63. The task of criticizing transcendental experience and knowledge.- § 64. Concluding word.

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Anonymous

Posted March 17, 2000

The other review is invalid

In response to the other review, Cartesian Meditations is representative of Husserl's mature phenomenology and is (thus) his most clearly and precisely developed work. 'Boring' is an invalid and ill-informed evaluation. This work offers a profound answer (quite apart from Decartes reductio) to Kantian idealism and (as such) was to set the tone (not to mention establish the conditions of possibility) for the entirity of what we now refer to as continental philosophy: from Levinas, to Derrida, Lyotard, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty. To attempt to trace the influence of this work is in fact to entirely rewrite 20th C philosophy and critical theory. This is essential reading and groundwork therefore for anyone with a serious interest in anything that happened in scholarship generally throughout this period (the last reviewer obviously not adherent to this description).

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted February 5, 2000

Phenomenology

Following a Kantian trend, Husserl explicates his own theories as he started Phenomenology. Decent insights, yet written in the old German Kant style (i.e. boring).

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